be studied through the lens of clientelism, and greater attention would have to be paid to the patterns of Bolsa installation during the rollout period, when the rate of payments to eligible persons differed widely across Brazil.
The data referred to above is available online. Brazil’s Supreme Elec-
toral Court maintains a free public database of election returns to the municipal level. Several organizations conduct opinion polls in Brazil, the most reliable of which are Datafolha, the Getúlio Vargas Foundation, Vox Populi, and the Latin American Public Opinion Survey. Census data is also available through the website of the Brazilian Institute for Geography and Statistics. The Bolsa rolls are also available online. I received funding to travel to Brazil to conduct interviews with professors at three universities, the news editors of O Globo newspaper in Brasília, economists at the Institute for Advanced Economic Studies (an non-partisan government think tank), officials at the US Embassy in Brasília, and the staff of the social development ministry office that administers the Bolsa program.
A first set of OLS regressions will test for a relationship at the mu-
nicipal level between PT vote share and the share of the population receiving Bolsa benefits. These regressions will control for population size, PT vote share in the previous election, municipal GDP per capita, median income, the share of population with income in the lowest quartile of national income, the share of the population that is non-white, the share of the population that identifies as Pentecostal, and the share of votes cast for Lula. A second set will test for a relationship between per capita Bolsa payments and PT vote share. A third will test for a relationship between Bolsa payments as a share of municipal GDP and PT vote share. These tests will be run on both the 2006 and 2010 national elections.
Another set of regressions will treat the change in PT vote share over
time as the dependent variable. Most of the same controls will apply, though municipal GDP will be replaced with municipal GDP growth. Because a major source of municipal GDP growth in the period under study was the 92
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